Numerical Evaluation of Earthquake Settlements of Road Embankments and Its Mitigation by Preloading

This article presents an assessment of the effects of pore water pressure generation of the soil foundation on the seismic road embankment response. Numerical simulations were carried out to study the preloading technique as an improvement method for reducing the liquefaction potential and the induced settlements in a sandy soil profile. The analyses showed that the use of preloading reduces the induced settlements mostly because of the increase in lateral confinement in the superficial soil layers that results from an increase of the coefficient of lateral earth pressure at rest (ko). The research also showed that the efficiency of the countermeasure method was limited to cases in which earthquakes produced a liquefaction zone lower than the depth of the overconsolidated soil.